This chapter explores a 1912 legal opinion (fatwā) by the Iranian Twelver Shīʿī jurist Muḥammad Ḥusayn Fishārakī (d. 1353/1935) on a dispute over the ownership of two villages, Jayshī and Saryān, both of which were endowed and had been illegally sold by a trustee in order to escape his various financial troubles. The fatwā upholds the legitimacy of the endowments (sing. waqf) and finds that their sale had been unlawful. The source sheds light on how Islamic law in modern and early modern Iran often operated outside the context of state institutions.

This chapter explores a 2012 legal opinion (fatwā) of the MUI—the Indonesian Ulama Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia) empowered by President Suharto in 1975 to serve as a semi-official religious authority—on the Shīʿī preacher Tajul Muluk, operating in Sampang (East Java). The fatwā comments on the distinctive legal and theological doctrines of the Twelver Shīʿa generally, which are found wanting. The authors emphasise the collective probity of the Prophet’s Companions (ṣaḥāba), the illegitimacy of temporary marriage (mutʿa) and the legitimacy of tarāwīḥ prayer in Ramaḍān, among other issues, and cite a large number of premodern Sunnī theologians and jurists to argue that the Twelver Shīʿa are guilty of unbelief (kufr). They hold that Tajul Muluk must thus be prosecuted, not under the legal norms associated with apostasy (ridda) in the Islamic legal tradition, but with ‘blasphemy against Islam’ as defined in Indonesian state law.